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Google Photos: 4 Smart New Features You Didn’t Think You’d Need

If Google Photos has always been your favorite backup cloud storage (unlimited storage is hard to say no to), you might like it more than ever. Google is introducing a few smart features to its photo storage tools, all parked under the Assistant tab.

1. Rediscover your memories

Notice how Facebook occasionally reminds you of photos that you’ve taken years ago on your News Feed? This is Google’s take on the same concept.

Google has included a feature on Google Photos that will highlight photos that were taken a long time ago, allowing you to relive your past without needing to scroll through your entire photo library.

2. Recent highlights

Whereas “Rediscover your memories” is meant to draw out the distant past, “Recent Highlights” shines a spotlight on your more recent photos. This feature will group together your best photos that were shot within the past month under a single banner.

3. Video animations

Previously, animations can only be made from photos. Today, animations can also be made from your video library as well. You can now use Google Photos to create short animations using snippets of your videos like a pseudo-GIF maker.

4. Auto-Rotate

A quality-of-life-improvement feature, Auto-Rotate would cause Google Photos to scan through your photo album to look for sideways pictures. Once found, the app would automatically rotate the pictures until they are in the right position.

This feature means that you no longer need to manually rotate your pictures.

All these features are already available for Android, iOS and the web version of Google Photos.